Menu

Experiences with Kudos: “No one will put as much energy and thought into promoting your work as you do”

After a short break we are back with more ‘Experiences with Kudos’. Our first interview of 2017 is with Dr Russell Warne who specialises in Psychology at Utah Valley University, United States.

How did you discover Kudos?

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon Kudos, but it was in February 2016. I puttered around a little bit, but didn’t do much. My active involvement started in September 2016 after I watched a Kudos webinar and decided to participate in the site more actively. I now try (on most days) to do something to promote my research. Often that includes sharing on Kudos, but sometimes it is as simple as emailing an article to a former student or a colleague.

Can you describe Kudos to other authors and academics who might not know about it?

Kudos is a platform to publicize research and track the effectiveness of their efforts to let other people know about their work.

Kudos lets me gather information about who is aware of my article and how.

If an article is being under appreciated, Kudos make this visible so I know which articles to publicize more.

What was your experience of using Kudos in terms of navigability, functionality and results?

Kudos is pretty intuitive to learn. I like how easy it is to write a tweet about an article and share it automatically. Claiming articles is easy, and they’re available almost from the instant that the publisher puts them online.

There are some things I wish were different. The “activity log” statistics should be combined with the “metrics” menu, for example. I also wish that the context for Altmetric scores were displayed on the author dashboard. Altmetrics are my bread and butter for evaluating the reach of my articles, and the more information I can get with fewer mouse clicks, the better off I am.

Editor’s note from David Sommer, Product Director: we are currently working on a brand new publication profile page that will provide exactly this functionality! Metrics and activity will all be available together in one place. We are also working on a brand new author dashboard that will provide many benefits including context for Altmetric scores. We have worked with user experience experts to reduce the number of clicks and are excited to be sharing this with you later in the year.

Our recent campaign to ‘Mobilize Research’ focuses on encouraging researchers to reach wider audiences by sharing their work online. Why do you think that it is important for researchers to publicize their work?

When I was in grad school (not that long ago, I promise!) I was told that publishing good research was enough to get your work noticed. The “cream” would rise to the top, and the best research would get cited. But four years after earning my PhD, I realized that wasn’t true. Researchers have to work to get noticed.

There’s no formal training for this sort of research promotion; everyone is just sort of winging it right now.

As I’ve said elsewhere, researchers are the perfect people to do this sort of promotion because no one will put as much energy and thought into promoting their work as they do. So, I recommend that researchers give it a shot. Try. Fail. Learn. We’re all figuring this out together.